Borderlands 2

Recently I’ve been trying to give a little time to actually playing some of the games I’ve bought, and so I’ve been catching up with Borderlands 2.

I’ve currently completed the main campaign, and am now working through some of the downloadable content. I really enjoyed the first game, and Borderlands 2 is more of the same so if you liked the first game you can’t go very far wrong.

Borderlands 2 begins with a choice of character class. Normally I would have stuck with the soldier character that I used in the first Borderlands, who has a deployable turret specialism. However, taking a leaf, quite literally out of Raph Koster’s short but insightful book “A theory of fun” this time I chose to play as a Siren. Koster argues that we should diversify our choice of player characters in order to take ourselves outside of our comfort zone and learn something new. I think I did learn something, which was that my choice didn’t really seem to matter very much. I have experimented briefly with other classes, and in the end the type of character you end up playing depends more on how you allocate your skill points that the character you choose in the first place! Many of the characters can be moulded to suit different play styles.

Borderlands 2 also offers you the opportunity to change your skill points at any time (for a fee). This is nice, because it means I can still experiment with new characters without needing to start over, and I can still learn something about playing using different styles for the cost of a few in game coins.

If you’re a fan of Borderlands then I heartily recommend Borderlands 2 for more of the same – just remember to change it up once in a while!